A Rigorous Quasi‐Experimental Design to Evaluate the Causal Effect of a Mandatory Divorce Education Program

All couples with minor children who filed for divorce within a specific 6‐week period (N = 191 couples) in one jurisdiction were ordered to attend a divorce education program. The control group included about 20 couples randomly selected from each of six 6‐week intervals before and six 6‐week intervals after the treatment interval (N = 243 couples). Archival records were searched for variables such as legal and residential custody award, visitation percentage, and relitigation. The impact of the program was assessed by evaluating, for each variable, whether the data for program interval departed from the straight (regression) line drawn through all the control group intervals. Only the visitation time award significantly differed: 27.75% for treatment couples and 22.46% for control couples. Analyses show that the father's attendance at the program primarily accounts for the difference.

Key Points for the Family Court Community
• There are considerable methodological weaknesses in most of the existing evaluations of divorcing parent education programs.
• Stronger, more scientifically rigorous—and thus persuasive—designs are possible in court settings, such as the regression discontinuity quasi‐experimental design we feature here.
• Archival records, such as various court filings, are a rich and relatively untapped source of data.
• Being mandated to attend a single 2‐hour divorcing parent education class caused an increase in the visitation time award in divorce decrees.
• There is a disconnect between being mandated by a judge to attend a program and actual attendance.

     

Candidate Authenticity: ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’

Political Behavior - In recent electoral contests, political observers and media outlets increasingly report on the level of “authenticity” of political candidates. However, even though...     

Operationalizing cultural citizenship: towards a concept of culture regime*

This paper contributes to the study of cultural citizenship by laying the foundations for a concept of culture regime. Depicting culture as a malleable concept that encompasses both particularistic and universalistic elements, the paper emphasizes the potential of the concept of culture regime to bridge those of citizenship, language and ethnicity regime. While presenting narrow conceptions of culture as ethnic identity as a defensible compromise in the context of comparative empirical research, the paper discusses how the study of culture regimes could integrate broader approaches to culture by incorporating other forms of cultural claims and identities that go beyond ethnic traits. In doing so, the paper aims to promote an inter-disciplinary dialogue on cultural citizenship, arguing that some of the differences in cross-disciplinary approaches to culture owe to methodological rather than ontological considerations.     

Beyond the scarcity scare: reframing the discourse of hunger with an eco-mind

Solutions to world hunger continue to be impeded by a frame – a set of assumptions – that keeps much of humanity focusing narrowly on quantitative growth. The result is greater food production and greater hunger. Yet, across the world another way of seeing, one grounded in the relational insights of ecology, is transforming food systems in ways that both enhance flora and fauna and strengthen human relationships, enabling farmers to gain a greater voice in food production and fairer access to the food produced.     

Book Review: Gendered mobility

In the decades after 1945, Danish governments approved a series of family policy reforms which came to constitute the core elements of what is considered the women-friendly welfare state. In order to understand these developments, this article explores the rise of women's political influence, looking specifically at women's agency outside the parliamentary sphere. This article analyses how a network of influential women combined critical resources such as knowledge of families' concerns and inside information from commissions and boards with agenda-setting strategies promoting family policy reforms, even though women constituted a minority in parliament and had no permanent women's state institution. Hence, modern Danish family policy was not a state project granted to women but to a great extent the result of a network of exceptional women setting a new agenda.     

Evolution and Gender

Dupre´ considers recent attempts to explain gendered difference in human behaviour by an appeal to evolutionary theory, particularly in the context of the recent programme of 'evolutionary psychology'. It argues that the fundamental assumptions of this programme are unsupported and implausible, and the attempt it offers of providing a universal account of human behaviour does little or nothing to counter the prima facie diversity of gender difference. A more sophisticated understanding of evolutionary theory suggests that we should see gender as developing out of a complex and variable cascade of interactions between biology and environment, rather than as the expression of species-wide biological universals.